Simple Obituary, Fascinating Life

BOOKS - BETWEEN THE LINES

September 15, 1991|By Nancy Pate, Sentinel Book Critic

The story in the Sentinel was brief. Poet Laura Riding Jackson, a resident of the little Florida town of Wabasso, died Sept. 2 at a Sebastian hospital at the age of 90. She had been associated in the 1920s with the dissident Southern writers known as the Fugitives. With the English poet Robert Graves, she founded Seizin Press.

Uh-huh, I thought reading that last line. There's a lot more to the story. Laura Riding and Robert Graves had one of the most intense, obsessive and puzzling love affairs in literary history. Their relationship spanned 14 years, during which time both writers produced their most notable works: Riding's Collected Poems and the novel A Trojan Ending; Graves' memoir of World War I, Good-bye to All That, the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and Collected Poems. In collaboration, they also wrote several influential critical works including A Survey of Modernist Poetry.

As for their life together, it was unconventional, to say the least, the very stuff of tabloids: adulteries, attempted suicides, temper tantrums in public places, raging jealousies and quarrels.

In his 1990 biography of his uncle, Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940 (Viking, $24.95), Richard Perceval Graves examines the relationship between the two writers with discernment and without sensationalism. As he writes in his introduction, ''Laura Riding herself appears considerably more complex than in the past . . . Within these pages she is (for most of the time) neither saint nor sinner. Instead I found a highly manipulative but also highly vulnerable woman, capable of inspiring both passionate devotion and passionate hatred, who was first Graves' salvation, but ultimately came close to destroying him.''

The facts alone make for a dramatic story. Brooklyn-born Laura Reichnthal (who later adopted the Riding surname) first met Graves in January of 1926, when she accepted his invitation to come to England to collaborate on a book. He was 31, married to would-be artist Nancy Nicholson and the father of four young children. The fast friendship between Riding and Graves soon became something more, and for a while the two lived in a menage a trois with Nicholson. Later, poet Geoffrey Phibbs made a fourth, but when he transferred his devotion from Riding to Nicholson, Riding pitched herself out a fourth-floor window, and Graves followed from the floor below, certain that Riding was dead and unable to contemplate life without her.

Graves was bruised in the fall; Riding broke her back and pelvis. No wonder that Graves' sister Rosaleen commented that she felt like the whole situation was out of a Russian novel. After Riding recovered from her injuries, she and Graves decamped for Majorca. There they remained until 1936, with Riding continuing to dominate the relationship, isolating Graves from his family, alienating him from many of his friends and orchestrating all aspects of his life, including his friendships and affairs with other women.

Graves, in turn, was her obedient servant, regarding her as his muse and best critic. He dedicated Good-bye to All That to Riding, and she was the inspiration behind many of his poems. Richard Graves speculates that his uncle worked out some of his subconscious dark feelings for Riding when writing I, Claudius and sees much of Riding in the character of the manipulative, tyrannical Livia. Riding herself thought I, Claudius ''a very boring book.''

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, the couple fled to England, where their relationship unraveled over the next few years. Riding became attached to American poet and critic Schuyler Jackson, while Graves found consolation with young Beryl Pritchard. After Riding finally broke with Graves in 1940, he married Pritchard and Riding married Jackson.

The Jacksons moved to Wabasso in the early 1940s. Around this same time, Riding, who continued her critical writings, renounced poetry ''as imposing irremovable obstacles to the realizing of the full potential afforded by language.'' This from a woman who once wrote that writing a poem ''is better than fun or comfort'' because it is ''like being alive for always.''